The Dark Chronicles (60 page)

I turned my attention to the dome itself. A couple of feet down there was a horizontal ring of small windows, like portholes in a ship. And between the windows, vertical mouldings circled the dome, jutting out from the surface like giant white centipedes. Fixed to the roofs of the windows and running down the centre of the centipedes were dozens of small iron discs, reddish brown with rust. They stirred a dim memory – wasn’t the dome illuminated on certain occasions? Perhaps these discs once held the torches. At any rate, they were fastened to the surface with iron spikes. I glanced over at Sarah, and her eyes bulged as she realized what I had in mind. But Severn and Zimotti were jostling through the crowd on either side of us, calling out that it was a public emergency. They would be here any moment. We had no choice.

I took a firm hold of the railing and hoisted myself over, ignoring the screams of a woman behind me. Once on the other side, I jammed my right plimsoll down and under the nearest disc. Would it take my weight? There was only one way to find out. I worked my way down to the bottom of the railing with my hands, flattening the front of my body against the side of the dome as I did. Close up, the surface was covered with threads of black grime and pigeon droppings. I lifted my left leg away for an instant and the disc didn’t budge beneath my right foot, so I lowered myself once more and wedged my left shoe into the next disc down.

I took a breath, then looked up, expecting to see Sarah descending the same way. But she was still astride the railing, and she wasn’t moving. She had frozen to the spot.

‘I can’t!’ she said, almost sobbing with fear. ‘I… can’t move.’

But she was moving – her legs were shaking. Any moment now and she would lose her balance and fall.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘But you have to come
now
.’

As if in answer to this, there was some sort of a commotion to the left, and I looked up and saw Severn leaning over the side of the railing, one hand raised to hold back frightened tourists. There was a pistol in the other, and he was aiming it straight at her.

‘Everyone around you ends up dead…’

Not this time. Please not this time.

I shouted up to Sarah that she had to move and she shook her head violently, but then something made her realize she had no choice and she brought her legs over and lowered herself down onto the centipede to the left of mine, her shoe reaching the first disc as the shot came, sending a blast of sparks off the railing. This church might not be the target of the operation, but Severn and Zimotti clearly weren’t squeamish about damaging it.

I looked up at Sarah, whose face was flushed from the effort. We had a moment’s breathing space, because we were now out of Severn’s line of sight and he couldn’t shoot around curves. But only a moment: he had probably ordered some of his men to take the staircase and wait for us at the bottom, but the crowds would hold them up and there were several exits. His best chance to catch us now was to follow us over the railings, and I was pretty sure he’d realize it.

I started climbing down the rest of the way, my hands now clutching the spikes that kept the discs in place, which were blisteringly hot after a few hours in the sun. In principle it was easy, like climbing down a step-ladder. But the ladder was curved, and if we made one slip we would fall to our deaths.

We made our way down our separate ladders as quickly as we could and reached the rim of the dome, where there were plinths large enough to stand on. There was a jump of several feet to the next level, but I could see a relief of stone flowers jutting out from the wall between my section and the next plinth along. It looked like a safer bet, so I shimmied over to the next ledge, clutching at a thinner line of centipedes descending from the top, and then crouched and hung my legs over the side. I glanced down and saw that the relief wasn’t protruding as much as I’d thought it would, so I let go and tried to angle my body in as I dropped.

My right knee crunched down on the top of the relief, and I let out a cry and threw my hands up to gain a hold before I slipped
over the edge. My fingers gripped something, and I looked up to see that they had hooked around the lower lip of the mouth of a fierce-looking stone lion: a relief just above the flowers that hadn’t been visible from my vantage point on the ledge. I pulled my other knee up until I was kneeling firmly on the top of the floral relief. Once I was comfortable, I turned around and prepared to lower myself again and jump the final few feet to the ledge beneath.

The pain came from nowhere. My throat felt thick and constricted, and I was being dragged back upward. He had his boots wrapped around my neck and he was trying to crush my windpipe. My eyes rolled upward and I saw a pair of boots and the first few inches of a pair of trouser-legs hanging from the ledge directly above me. The trousers were midnight blue – not Severn, then, but Zimotti. I suddenly felt very cold, and realized that my teeth were chattering.

Zimotti was shaking his legs frantically, trying to swing me out so he could drop me over the ledge and to the ground far below. My fingers started slipping as my breathing began to suffer and I tried to call out to Sarah, who I could hear was still in the next section along, but nothing came from my throat.

Above me, Zimotti was grunting and cursing, but his voice sounded peculiar and I realized that it
wasn’t
, in fact, Zimotti but his hawk-faced hatchet man. I hadn’t seen him on the gallery earlier. Among his curses, I heard the word ‘Fratello’ repeated several times and with a shock it hit me that he meant the sniper in St Paul’s, who was either literally his brother or a brother in arms, and that he blamed me for his death and wanted vengeance for it. Vengeance for a man who had been given the task of assassinating me, and who had thought nothing of using a defenceless child as a shield.

Fury pulsed through me and I used the strength of it to jerk my head down violently in an effort to dislodge his boots from around my throat. But it didn’t make any difference. They were locked there, and squeezing tighter by the moment. As I started to choke and felt my vision beginning to black out, I did the only thing I
could think of: I lifted my left hand from the relief for a moment and punched up between the Bird Man’s legs, towards his groin.

He screamed, and I quickly reached to grab hold of the relief once again. Stone scratched against my nails and then my fingers gripped tightly, and as they did, the pressure around my neck floated away, and I realized that the Bird Man was starting to fall. I gripped tighter with my hands, and the scream intensified and wind brushed against me and I looked down as his torso cracked against the rim of the ledge beneath and he spun towards the courtyard below, sending a group of tourists screaming.

For a moment I thought it might not have been enough of a fall to kill him, but then the stone beneath him began to turn red and vomit rose in my throat. I winced and gulped it down. My shirt was now soaked in sweat and clinging to my back. And I could hear the sound of someone moving above. It wasn’t over. We had to get down before the others came.

My fingers started to slip, and finally I let go. I landed on the ledge and my thighs clenched with the pain, so sharp it took my breath away. But nothing was broken and I was safely in the centre of the ledge. I took a deep breath and looked up to see Sarah preparing to make the same jump a few feet away. Directly below us – within easy reach – was the white-railinged flight of stairs we had come up, and below that the courtyard with the dead man sprawled across it. We just had to reach that courtyard. After that, we could take the stairs down.

I could sense Sarah hesitating again and decided to lead by example, to show her how close we were. There was a tiled roof a couple of feet from the ledge. I scurried over, then levered myself onto it using the chimney, after which I began creeping down the tiles like a crab.

‘See?’ I called. ‘It’s easy.’

There was a thud above me and I looked up, expecting to see Sarah landing on the ledge. But instead I saw Barnes. Christ, they’d brought the lot of them. He was wearing the same fatigues he’d
been in at the base in Sardinia, and his pale blue eyes were blazing with hatred. He stood to his full height and his mouth formed a grim smile: he thought he had me. He was grasping something in his hand, and it glittered momentarily in the sun. It had a long, thin blade: a stiletto knife? Severn must have given it to him, because he couldn’t have brought it through… I stopped. We hadn’t come through customs. He could have had it strapped to his leg the whole time.

I looked past him, trying to see where Sarah had gone, but she seemed to have disappeared and the move was a mistake because Barnes saw his chance and leapt forward, pushing me further down the roof and towards the line of railings that enclosed the flight of stairs. As he jerked the knife down, I threw my arms up and grabbed hold of his wrist, managing to stop the blade a few inches from my neck. He grunted, his mouth clamped shut and a hissing noise emanating from his nostrils, and the blade moved closer. I pushed back against him with every sinew and fibre, but I knew that I could only hold out for another second or two at the most. He was older than me, but he was fitter, better trained and, like the Bird Man, he wanted revenge – in his case, justifiably.

There was a blur of movement and his free hand came round in a tight fist, aiming low, and I recognized the old commando move and made to counter it with my forearm. I caught it just in time, but in the meantime the blade continued its descent. I pushed back again. Beads of sweat dripped into my eyes, stinging them, and I tried to blink them away, to no avail. Barnes grunted again, and as the blade dropped another fraction of an inch I prepared myself for it to pierce into me. But then I realized with a flash of intuition what I had to do, and I abruptly relaxed my grip and jerked my head away sharply at the same moment, and the surprise and momentum were too much for him to correct and as his arm came down he lost his balance and the whole upper half of his body tipped over with it, and then I was looking down at the cluster of railing spikes emerging through the top of his head, the tips
covered in some dark slimy mixture I didn’t want to think about. He moaned one last moan, and then his limbs went into a final spasm and he was still.

I wiped the sweat from my eyes and breathed in deeply to calm myself. Then I called up to Sarah to make the last leap. She did it, making a much better landing than I had done, and then she climbed onto the tiled roof and I helped her over the railings and we walked down the steps into the courtyard. I asked her if she felt she could continue. She nodded, and we left the bodies of Bird Man and Barnes and staggered past the open-mouthed and horrified tourists down the remaining stairs until we reached the square. There was no sign of Severn and Zimotti, but I had no doubt they were coming.

We stumbled through the crowd and into one of the side streets – but where to now? Hiring a car was out of the question, as their next step would be to contact all the rental places, so a description of anything we hired would immediately be sent to every police station in the country. The most anonymous form of travel, and I reckoned our best bet, was the train. A teenager on a bright red Vespa hurtled straight towards us, and I stepped out in front of him, putting my hand out officiously and yelling for him to stop. He slowed fractionally, and as he passed I yanked him by the collar and dragged him off the bike, hoisting myself into his place.

‘Get on!’ I called to Sarah. She hobbled over and clambered aboard, and I changed gears as the former owner shook his fists at our smoke. Needs must.

I parked the Vespa in Piazza dei Cinquecento and we headed into the main hall of Termini railway station, past young people smoking and flirting and generally having the time of their lives. There was a swarm of people surrounding the ticket booth, to the extent that it wasn’t clear where one queue ended and the next began. I looked up at the departure board and saw that the next train to Turin was leaving in less than five minutes: the Tirreno, a fast service that stopped at Pisa and a few other places on the way. It was our only chance. We would just have to pay on board, or hope the train was so crowded that the conductor didn’t bother to check tickets.

We rushed across to the platform and, to my relief, I saw that it was indeed crowded. Dozens of men were calling to each other as they tried to coordinate an effort to bring all the luggage onto the train. Some were pulling their suitcases tied together with string through the doors, while others were lifting them to their friends and squeezing them through the windows of the compartments.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Sarah. ‘Why are they taking suitcases to a religious festival?’

She shook her head. ‘They’re not going to the festival – they’re heading north for work. The “economic miracle” has run out of steam down here.’

We made our way through the throng and climbed onto the train, then walked along the corridors looking for seats. We squeezed past students strumming guitars, tourists consulting maps, a
monsignor cutting open a garlic sausage, and everywhere these wild-eyed men in their threadbare suits trailing their suitcases behind them. Finally we found a compartment with a couple of spare seats, which was otherwise occupied by an elderly Mother Superior and a gaggle of young nuns excitedly exchanging gossip and unpacking sandwiches for the journey. A whistle blew and we were off.

As the wheels started gathering pace, the tension within me faded a little. We had lost them. I turned to Sarah. She had circles under her eyes, and cuts and dirt were smeared across her cheeks. She looked much more fragile than when I had first met her in the embassy, but infinitely more beautiful. I leaned across and gently placed my hand against her cheek, and she gave a wan smile in return.

I glanced out of the window and caught sight of a clock in the station. It was coming up to noon, and the departure board had said that we were due to arrive in Turin at quarter past seven. But train timetables didn’t mean much in Italy these days, and anything could delay us. Even if we arrived bang on time, we would have only forty-five minutes to get to the cathedral, and I suspected we would have a welcoming committee to evade first – Zimotti would have furnished the local
carabinieri
with detailed descriptions of the two of us. And even if we made it out of the station and to the cathedral, I had no idea what sort of explosive they would use. From what I remembered, the two explosions in Milan had been simple detonators with sticks of dynamite – but my source for that information was the Service’s file, and that had also claimed that Arte come Terrore were responsible. And I had a feeling this would be on a much bigger scale than the bombs in Milan. If we did find the bomb in time, the church authorities might listen, but they wouldn’t have access to any bomb disposal experts of their own. About all we could hope for was that they would clear the area – but how long would that take at such a massive event?